Los Angeles – Debi Thomas is standing at center ice. It’s 1988 in Calgary, and her entire skating life has built to this one moment, this four-minute long program. All she needs is one solid, clean program. All she needs is one repeat of countless, flawless practice sessions that week, and the Olympic gold medal is hers. The world is watching.

However, the world doesn’t see behind the dark brown eyes, eyes that are no longer focused. They’re lost. A horrid realization descends on this skater alone at the center of the Winter Olympics. It’s a voice. It comes from inside her brain. It’s sending an urgent message to her body.

“You’re not ready,” it says.

She knows it. Suddenly, nothing makes sense. Admittedly, she was burned out. She clashed with her coach over her stretching regimen. She had returned to train in Boulder after the opening ceremony, and her Olympic experience was no more enthralling than it was for her neighbors watching from their living room.

She’s standing at center ice with the lead. East Germany’s Katarina Witt skated well in her long program. So had Canada’s Elizabeth Manley. However, they trailed Thomas after the short.

Thomas is skating last.

She had spent that afternoon in her room lost in thought. Her self-motivation methods weren’t working. Maybe her body would take over and just sweep her through the program by rote.

In the biggest skate of her life, with Olympic glory four minutes away, Debi Thomas has no clue what to do. She feels the slow, enveloping strangulation of panic. Then the music begins. She skates fluidly across the ice. She heads into her first combination, a triple toe-triple toe, the most important element in her program.

She leaps high into the air …

No dwelling on the past

The Martin Luther King-Charles R. Drew Medical Center sits on a plot of land bordering south-central Los Angeles and Compton. It was built in the early 1970s after the Watts riots in an attempt to improve health care for the city’s poor. It’s a neighborhood where residents look through windows behind iron bars, where sections are divided not by ZIP code but by gang turf.

An armed security guard warns a visitor not to park on the street across from the hospital. He indicates the visitor should cruise the hospital parking lot until a space opens. It’s 10:30 in the morning.

Debi Thomas, 38, is sitting in a small upstairs office. It’s quiet, away from the crowds of patients waiting for their appointments below. Wearing black slacks and a white doctor’s coat with a pocket full of pens, she apologizes for being 35 pounds heavier than she was in Calgary.

However, her skin still has the same flawless contours it had when she was America’s best hope to knock off Witt, the 1984 Olympic champion and 1987 world champion. It’s 18 years later, and another Winter Olympics is here.

Thomas doesn’t dwell on the past. An orthopedic surgeon doesn’t have time. She has bones to mend, therapy to prescribe. The hospital, her place of business for five years, is next to three major freeways. Her nights are often filled with the anguish and screams of victims praying she’ll put them back together.

She’s happily married with a bright 8-year-old and a home in suburban Fountain Valley. She and her family have just returned from a holiday in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She leans back in her chair with the relaxed air of a woman who finally has it all.

“I am thrilled that every goal I’ve ever set for myself I’ve reached,” she says.

Growing up in San Jose, Calif., she decided she wanted to become a doctor when she was 5. Her mother, a computer programmer, got her little doctor kits when she wasn’t taking her to art museums and the theater. No nurse dolls allowed. Thomas remembers in kindergarten telling her babysitter’s daughter that she wanted to be a doctor.

“She said, ‘Well, you can’t be a doctor. You’re a girl,’ ” Thomas says, smiling. “Of course, I go home and go, ‘Mommy! (She) says I can’t be a doctor because I’m a girl!’ My mom’s like, ‘WHAT?!’ Then I got one of those keys around my neck so I could go home by myself.”

In Calgary, TV portrayed her as the skater with the brain. Debi Thomas was the one who would go on to bigger and better things after the Olympics. It was one of the few characterizations TV got right. She competed in Calgary while taking a year off from Stanford, where she majored in product design.

A month after the Olympics, Thomas quietly took third in the world championships and retired from competitive skating. She married her first husband and graduated with an engineering degree from Stanford in 1991.

In 1997, after an ill-advised year on the pro skating circuit, she graduated from the prestigious Northwestern University Medical School.

While her amateur skating career ended badly, her pro career started worse.

“I never really felt like I fit in; plus, I’m sort of a perfectionist,” Thomas says. “So there was some dance we were doing and I couldn’t get it right and I started throwing a fit. (Fellow skater) Peter Carruthers yelled at me and I stormed off. I was like, ‘I don’t need this. I’m going to be a doctor, blah, blah, blah.’ ”

But with medical school not starting for a while, she returned to the ice and actually learned she could play the clown. She could play the seductress. It entered medical school on a high note – an even better note on which to leave medical school was taking a year off to have Luc.

She came to MLK-Drew in 2000 and learned the carryover from skating to medicine is huge, although the mistakes are a bit more costly.

“It’s the dedication you have to train, and I don’t know if that can be taught,” she says. “The people who do that, they’re like that: I’m going to do this thing and going to be the best I can be at it and whatever it takes to do that I’m just going to do it.

“I was different. And I realize this more every day.”

Just as in her skating, Thomas doesn’t give up very easily. The day before, she spent an hour on the phone with a man in charge of revamping the hospital’s radiology department. She told him he had to do this and then do that and when he’s through with that do everything else. “I’m like telling him how to do his job,” she says. “But I have a work ethic.”

She leaves the office and takes the elevator downstairs. Spanish drowns out English in the corridors as she looks at a patient’s back and an X-ray showing the source of a patient’s arthritis pain.

Thomas speaks to a patient in broken Spanish, an on-the-job training course.

“The thing I like about medicine is, I like people and I like to interact with people and talk to them and help them,” she says. “I have this compassionate side.”

As she makes the rounds, the patients don’t recognize her. Thomas worked at the hospital for a year before her colleagues knew who she was.

Much left to do

Thomas cleanly completes the first triple-toe, but on the second, she lands on two skates, a major mistake. She bobbles her next jump, steps out of another jump and touches her hand to the ice on yet another. She has never seen a tape of the performance.

“But I remember every second of it,” she says. “I remember the second thing that I flubbed – maybe it was the third thing – it’s going through my head: Gee, I wonder how bad it would look if I just got off right now. I guess that would look pretty bad.”

People congratulate her for being the first black American to win a Winter Olympics medal, but bronze doesn’t look very good when gold is staring you in the face for 48 hours. That’s what she’s thinking as she stands at the podium, looking up to Manley and Witt. TV and a subsequent book made Thomas look bitter and unfriendly, particularly to Witt. She didn’t shake Witt’s hand on camera. She did shake her hand, but it was off ice. That look that could melt ice wasn’t anger.

“I was in shock,” Thomas says before letting out a laugh and adding, “I couldn’t believe I skated that badly. All this hype and, boy, you really didn’t skate well. I was trying to swallow that.”

She doesn’t anymore. The experience stuck halfway down her craw and she spit it out before she even entered medical school. But every four years, she analyzes it – thanks to probing reporters’ questions – and she still hasn’t come up with a sufficient answer.

She does, however, have a theory.

She had been so perfect in practice that she skipped her normal pre-competition mental preparation. Her estranged coach Alex McGowan had told her that enough repetition in practice would convince her body to perform.

“No, it’s psychological,” she says. “You’ve got to be up for it and you’ve got to make it happen. But why at that crucial moment, why I changed what I’d normally do, I don’t know. I panicked, I guess. I didn’t fight for it. I didn’t want it enough.”

Thomas speaks freely. She doesn’t get choked up. When you see 15-year-olds with gunshot wounds and passengers maimed in auto accidents, it’s difficult to get weepy about lost glory.

Plus, her future is even brighter than her past. She’d like to practice in the Caribbean. She wants to be an astronaut. She loves spending time with her family while working full time. She wants to reconcile with McGowan.

She’ll tune in when the women’s short program airs from Turin on Tuesday. When someone launches into a triple combination, she won’t feel a pang of regret. Winning Olympic gold was never one of her childhood goals.

“It’s not that painful because I knew I had a future,” she says. “I knew I had the rest of my life to do great things.”

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